Quoting "Brian J. Beesley" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:

> Finally, even a >3GHz P4 desktop system _can_ be almost if not entirely 
> silent, whereas a laptop system generating comparable performance is very 
> likely to sound like a fully-loaded Boeing 747 making a takeoff run right 
> outside the window, at any rate for the rather limited time before the 
> battery runs flat.

I think that this is the most important difference between a desktop
system you put together and a desktop system that is bought ready-made.
Every DIY system I've seen sounds like a 747, and almost every ready-made
system is barely audible at all. PC wholesalers will never tell you 
how loud a given PSU or case is, and it's not clear there's a formalism
they can use to do so even if they wanted to. One's only recourse is
to scour the internet looking for someone who kept buying parts until
they got the right combination, then attempting to reproduce their
(probably older) system exactly. Meanwhile the Dell and Apple desktops
I've seen are unbelievably quiet.

Sour grapes from someone whose dual opteron system is a lot faster than
a Dell or Apple for his work, but louder out of all proportion.

A little more on-topic: Andy Glew once remarked that when he switched from
a desktop main machine to a laptop main machine, the extra peace and
quiet he noticed was shocking, and convinced him that small mobile 
computation was the wave of the future.

jasonp


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